Community Counts: Curing election hangover blues

By Kathleen Schatzberg news@barnstablepatriot.com

Wednesday

Nov 23, 2016 at 5:09 PMNov 23, 2016 at 5:39 PM

As a nation, and as a community on Cape Cod, we’ve just experienced the most bruising election season in anyone’s memory. Some 19th-century elections may have featured more rancor and fevered attacks, but none of us were around to see it.

Reportedly, election fever in 2016 revealed deep fissures, setting brother against sister, neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague. I admit it myself: I had heated arguments on Facebook with the accountant who’s prepared my tax returns for 30 years, and with some people I didn’t even know.

How do we get back to a “new normal” even as the passions of the election show no sign of abating? The costs of not doing so could be greater than we imagine.

I remember one awful spring in my senior year at university. I recall exactly when I heard the news that Martin Luther King had been murdered, and exactly where I was a few weeks later when the radio announced Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.

I was devastated. What I believed was an orderly democracy seemed to be crumbling around me. Always a news junkie and avid follower of politics, I retreated. I felt nothing I could do would make a difference, and it would be 15 years before I stepped into an election booth again.

My “re-entry epiphany” was a realization that I could actually make a difference at the end of my own fingertips – my school, my neighborhood, my community. That’s when “Community Counts” became my mantra. It’s not a bad posture: many argue that local political and civic actions have far greater impacts on our lives than national activism.

I looked around our community this week. Nearly five years after the Baptist Church on West Main Street burned, the Council of Churches continues to improve on the meal service to our “food insecure” neighbors. The students at Cape Cod Community College built a food pantry, too, and nursing students support the flu shot clinic held at the college every year as winter approaches.

The Yarmouth Food Pantry realized that children who are eligible for free lunch in public schools are probably going hungry on weekends. They mounted a response, an effort that is being replicated across the Cape.

Another group, Angel Flowers, collects simple vases that accumulate in our basements and flowers left from weddings and funerals, and from these, bring small bouquets of flowers to shut-in elders and military veterans.

Likewise, Habitat for Humanity is still building homes for people who can’t afford a home. With community volunteers and their own “sweat equity,” these folks experience the thrill of owning their own home, usually for the first time in their lives.

For yet another avenue, work on building our political strength and join the League of Women Voters to help provide clear and unbiased information to voters. Also, work to register more voters – such a needed antidote after an election in which millions who could have voted simply stayed home.

Perhaps you’d like to join with the Cape Cod Fellowship of Reconciliation as they create dialogue with our Muslim neighbors. We would all do well to learn clearly the difference between faithful Muslims, as committed to strong communities as any of us, and the terrorists who fraudulently claim religious justification.

Small things, perhaps, but collectively, they are building a stronger community, a more caring community, a more resilient community. Chase those election blues away by doing your share to ensure that “Community Counts.”

Kathleen Schatzberg is the former president of Cape Cod Community College. Her monthly column chronicles community building on Cape Cod.